Tuesday, May 31, 2016

A new superhero has arrived! Tinder has the ability to destroy others with a left swipe! Watch him as he battles an army of evil bots set to take over the world -the world of internet dating! Tinder is joined by other superheroes as he pursues his archnemesis eHarmony in a war of wits and superpowers. Too bad Tinder has more power than wit. This movie trailer parody is brought to you by Rooster Teeth. (via Tastefully Offensive)

Decorating one’s graduation cap, or mortarboard, is an opportunity to illustrate a degree, share a quote, make a joke, or communicate what’s important to the graduate. Some use movies, TV shows, and internet memes to make a statement. See 15 of them in a list I posted at mental_floss.

Léo Brunel’s student animation project Voltage is a nightmare of physics for the characters, but a laugh for us! Two hapless mechanics attempt to protect a customer’s vehicle from disaster when the garage gets a little out of hand. There is no deep message here. It’s just fun. Brunel says this sequence was inspired by Laurel and Hardy. (via Everlasting Blort)

Monday, May 30, 2016

When you’re the younger brother, you’re always player two. That’s the way it is growing up playing video games with your older sibling. But there comes a time when “the way it is” suddenly is no more. Older brothers grow up, leave home, and suddenly the younger is player one. While it’s nice to be number one, it’s a bittersweet victory.

Zachary Antell captures that feeling that so much of the video game generation can relate to, in this story that’s making the rounds of various film festivals. If you ever bonded with a sibling over The Legend of Zelda or Super Mario, you might need to have a hankie ready. (via Geeks Are Sexy)

This little chipmunk thought he had stumbled on a perfect treasure trove when he found a full bird feeder. Yet he couldn’t shake the feeling he was doing something wrong by taking all those seeds. When confronted by the guy who loaded the feeder, he did the only thing a thief with a conscience would do. He gave it all back. Under enough pressure, a thief will cough up the goods. Of course, it’s probably just a fear response, but look at how much he had stuffed in those cheeks! (via Arbroath)

Coal miners in the early 20th century risked their lives just to go to work every day. In the first decade of the 20th century, around a half-dozen miners died on the job every month in the coal mines of northern Illinois. Nationwide, more than 2000 coal miners died on the job every year between 1905 and 1930. But the workers at Cherry Mine in Cherry, Illinois, which included some underage workers as young as 10, never expected a disaster on the scale of the 1909 fire that killed 259 miners. Read the whole story in an article I wrote for mental_floss.

Sunday, May 29, 2016

Vulcans might be completely logical, and Spock is super smart, but he still had trouble with metaphors. Here are some clips from Star Trek: the Original Series that made us love him so. (via Metafilter)

Chris Poole (not Moot) has observed quite a few things about cats while caring for Cole and Marmalade. Here he shares the logic cats us, which is a bit different from human logic. You knew that. But you’ll enjoy this anyway. (via Neatorama)

Let’s Melt This is a YouTube channel that shows various things melting. This one a switch-up, where they show the videos in reverse. It’s neat because instead of being destructive, it looks constructive. Also, some of the things are completely unidentifiable melted, so we get to guess what they are as the video rolls. The only part I don’t like is that the music is backwards, too. If that bugs you, turn the volume down, or mute it. (via Laughing Squid)

Donovan Livingston is getting a masters degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in this clip. During the graduation ceremony, he spoke about American education using a spoken word poem. You’ll find the transcript here. (via Uproxx)

Saturday, May 28, 2016

This 1948 film is a fictionalized version of the story of Newton Knight, who led of group of Southerners who seceded from the Confederacy. Tap Roots was described as "Gone With The Wind for abolitionists," and isn’t all that historically accurate. Knight’s story will be retold again in the new movie Free State of Jonesthis summer. (via Metafilter)

The folks at the Cincinnati Zoo outfitted Savanna the cheetah with a GoPro camera on her back. She probably wouldn’t have liked one on her head, and you really can’t force a wild cat to do something they don’t want to. Watching her zoom around the compound with this point of view is kind of scary, like riding in the car with your 16-year-old driving.

Even when they go to slow-motion, you really get a sense of how fast they run. I couldn’t even keep up with a cheetah in slow motion! But then again, if a wild predator were chasing me, I might surprise myself. (via Tastefully Offensive)

Barnaby Dixon shows off his new puppet design, and it’s quite clever. It combines the articulation of a marionette with the direct action of a hand puppet. Of course, the skill of the operator is key to making it move realistically, and he’s pretty good at that, too.

The only drawback I see is that necessarily long loincloth, which could create design problems in making a specific puppet, but I’m sure that can be worked around. Dixon did another video, in which you can see how he assembles the puppet, and then it dances to music. Imagine this with a pair of black gloves underneath for live performance, or green gloves for videos. (via Viral Viral Videos)

Friday, May 27, 2016

A hundred years ago, automobiles were a new idea, so why would someone buy a car when they had a perfectly good horse, which was safer? Enter the marketing department. While the poor horses got slandered, there were definite advantages to driving cars, especially in cities. Car manufacturers didn’t have to be so nasty about it, but even when they’re right, business trumps the common good. The campaign against the horse wasn’t nearly as bad as the battle against pedestrians or the campaign to design American infrastructure around the automobile.(Thanks, Phil Edwards!)

A group of scientists are testing a new kind of sticky trap. To get accurate information on its effectiveness, they sent various types of humans across a 20-foot section of the material. First, a scientist as a baseline, then a sprinter, then a sumo wrestler. I was hoping the sumo wrestler wouldn’t get his loincloth caught in the sticky stuff. He does. Of course, this is an ad, for a Japanese cockroach trap. For such products, we’d hope they do their testing on actual cockroaches. (via Tastefully Offensive)

Once upon a time, you could find a phone booth on any city corner. But the rise in mobile phones means they're not used much anymore, and many are likely to be taken out of commission to save on maintenance costs. That might sound like a problem, but for some people, it's an opportunity. Here are some of the most creative ways phone booths have been transformed, in a list I posted at mental_floss.

Jonathan Lawrence was the third director hired to shoot the film Empires of the Deep, but the first of three to direct the actual shooting. The story of what went on behind the scenes at Atavist magazine is a fascinating look at how culture clash can suck millions of dollars down the drain. (via Digg)

Burger Fiction’s latest supercut is a welcome change. It’s nice to be welcomed. I think you’ll recognize the majority of these films, not least because many of them have the title in the clip. The word “welcome” will sound really silly by the time this is through. You’re welcome. (via Tastefully Offensive)

Okay, this premise is guaranteed to be funny. There’s really no reason that Australians should know these things about the United States, but they have a few drinks and give it their best shot anyway. Need I say this contains NSFW language? It does. Anyway, some of these folks know more about America, even drunk, than Americans know about Australia. Honestly, can you name the capital of Australia without looking it up? (via Buzzfeed)

Everyone loved Calvin and Hobbes, and they still do, even though the comic ceased over twenty years ago. What is it that made the strip so special? Bill Watterson never phoned it in. He held his comic to the highest standard until he ran out of things to say …and then he quit. The strips never had a chance to become repetitive or cliched. But that’s not all there was to it. Even all these years later, seeing a Calvin and Hobbes strip is a delight. Little boys with vivid imaginations will always be with us, as well as the philosophical questions they have about our confusing world.

Wednesday, May 25, 2016

When the captain tell you to get in the boat, you better not waste any time! A playground at Munson Park in Monroe, Michigan, is the setting for an epic high seas adventure. When you’re James Hashimoto, the Action Movie Kid, you can go with the flow, because you know that sooner or later, the stories in your adventure will come to life on video. But even if you aren’t, your parents can learn to do this from the tutorials his dad shares. You can see how this particular video was made here. (via Metafilter)

Today is National Tap Dance Day! You might think tap is an obsolete form of dance, but the troupe Syncopated Ladies puts a modern twist to their routines.
Here they dance to Prince’s song “When Doves Cry.” They dance in perfect rhythm with very little repetition in the routine. This had to take some real work to learn.

It’s the senior talent show. The entire student body has already sat through singers, musicians, and drama students with amazing talent that they’ve seen dozens of times before. Then this guy steps up. He has one talent, and he wrings all the drama he can out of it. Well, to be honest, he probably has other talents. Like showmanship, and making a lot of friends. How else would you draw a standing ovation for tossing a water bottle? The other question is, how long did he train to master this maneuver? (via Viral Viral Videos)

This is just a picture of two people hugging. It has a nice beach background. But wait, something is a little off about their legs. The more you look, the stranger it gets. How did her legs end up on the other side of his body?

They didn’t. And it hasn’t been Photoshopped. It’s just an accidental optical illusion. If you can’t figure it out, this outline will clue you in. See, she’s not wearing capris at all! She’s probably wearing a dress. (via reddit)

She went into the ladies’ room and used the handicap stall, which has a door that opens out. While she was in there, someone used the diaper-changing table on the wall and didn’t fold it back up. The table prevented the stall door from opening wide enough for her to exit. A comedy of errors.

This is not so much a tragedy but an illustration of poor design. Poor design, in this case, resulting from retrofitting a small bathroom with 1. a handicap stall, and 2. a diaper changing table. She wasn’t all that worried about getting out. It wasn’t too long before someone else came in, and even if it were, she had a phone. (via Digg)

The explanation of the universe starts with the very basics and grows from there. You probably won’t understand any more about the universe once it’s done, but you will enjoy a few laughs. Well, an explanation of the universe is quite complicated, so exurb1a must jump from one type of explanation to another, which is only more opportunities for puns. Who says physics can’t be funny? Or astronomy, biology, geology, etc. (via reddit)

In the more than 100 years between the widespread introduction of the typewriter and the rise of the word processor, a great many masterpieces have been produced on the handy office machines. Some of those machines are still around, and some are still in use. Find out what kind of typewriter your favorite author used in a list I wrote for metal_floss.

Rey was born eight months ago with no eyes. Alexander Speweik adopted Rey and her sister Leia, and Rey now gets around the apartment just fine. She even plays fetch!

Wadded up aluminum makes a great ball to roll around on a wood floor, and Rey follows it almost perfectly just by the sound. She also plays with boxes, climbs her cat tower, and wrestles with her sister. She doesn’t chase a laser light, but likes to play with the chain attached to the laser pen! You can follow Rey at her Facebook page or at Instagram. (via Digg)

Most students take their significant others or a friend to the prom. But sometimes circumstances, luck, or imagination intervene to pair a promgoer with someone—or something—very unexpected for that special occasion. Check out nine such prom dates in a list I prepared for mental_floss.

Why do we hold caucuses and primary elections? You might think it’s to select party candidates, but the party really controls what happens behind the scenes. And that goes for all political parties. John Oliver explains on Last Week Tonight.

Janeen recently attended her daughter's college graduation ceremonies
(congratulations, Janeen's daughter!) and took many pictures. Another
graduate at the school showed off her decorated mortarboard. She majored
in respiratory therapy, not English. Still, you'd think that the one word a respiratory therapist would be expected to spell properly would be "breathe." (Thanks, Janeen!)

How do you make an eggplant tasty? Some would say you barbecue it, while I think the sauce of garlic, onions, oil, and spices will do the job. Others would say you can’t make an eggplant tasty, but this demonstration from Guangzhou makes it look delicious. She’s demonstrating how to cook while her Australian husband provides the dry wit in his English translation. Their YouTube channel sarcasmo57 has quite a few other cooking videos with comparable translations. (via reddit)

Frankly, considering how many videos we’ve seen under the topic of “fun with dry ice,” I’m surprised you can’t find it at more grocery stores. The Crazy Russian Hacker bought thirty pounds of dry ice just to throw it in the pool. Which, of course, makes it wet ice. It looks pretty cool, but what is surprising is how long it lasted. (via Viral Viral Videos)

A gang of outlaws discusses the lack of diversity in their group while awaiting to rob a train. Contains NSFW language.

It turns out that the group is already way more diverse than you would expect in a historical era in which such gangs were usually quite homogeneous -all criminals and all kind of dumb. Well, they got that part right. (via Digg)

You’ve seen dogs dance with humans in canine freestyle competitions, but have you ever seen a goat dance with a human like that? Or a chicken? These goats do, and more besides. They run agility courses, and have learned to, uh, help Marie take her clothes off.

Marie Verbouw trained her goats Roosje and Kato and the chicken Milca to do all kinds of incredible things. Wait until the dogs get s load of a goat in their agility competitions! (via reddit)

Saturday, May 21, 2016

Grant Woolard, who gave us that awesome Classical Music Mashup a few months ago, is back to give the same treatment to Disney songs. he mixed 49 different songs into a pleasing mashup that highlights how similar some of them are, illustrated by musical notes made from icons of the movie, to make it easy for you to follow along. Some tunes stand out above the others, while some stay in the background, and others just blend well. I think you’ll like this! (Thanks, Marissa Bush!)